[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 161 (Wednesday, October 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15278-S15282]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TRIBUTE TO THOMAS J. DODD

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to speak with my colleagues 
today about a remarkable and really historic event that occurred in my 
State of Connecticut this past Sunday, October 15, when the University 
of Connecticut dedicated the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, associated 
with the University of Connecticut library. It is a center named, 
obviously, for the great former Senator from the State of Connecticut, 
father of my colleague and dear friend, the current Senator Chris Dodd.
  It was a spectacular day, a beautiful fall day in Connecticut, but 
obviously it was more than the weather that distinguished the day.
  What happened really was a fitting tribute, that will go on through 
the years and decades ahead, to Senator Tom Dodd and the remarkable 
record of achievement that he built here in the U.S. Senate where he 
served from 1958 to 1970 and in the years before then. The events began 
with a dedication at the library site itself and then proceeded to the 
Gampel Pavilion 

[[Page S 15279]]
where it looked to me like 8,000 or 9,000 people packed in to hear the 
President of the United States, President Clinton, deliver the first in 
a lecture series that will emanate from the Thomas Dodd Research 
Center, in this case specifically focused on the Nuremberg trials, 50 
years after, because Senator Tom Dodd was a prosecutor there.
  Mr. President, Tom Dodd, as President Clinton said, spent his life in 
the service of his country. He trained as a lawyer, served as an FBI 
agent, then as a lawyer for the U.S. Government. He was, throughout his 
career, a great fighter for freedom, for human rights. And it is to the 
study of human rights that this research center will be committed.
  Senator Dodd fought the tyranny of racism as an attorney prosecuting 
civil rights cases in the 1930's, which was a long time before most 
other Americans thought about the idea of civil rights.
  And throughout his time here in the Senate, and before in the House, 
he was a great fighter against the tyranny of communism, one of the 
great, principal, fervent anti-Communists of the cold war period who 
put us as a nation on a course to understand that the cold war was not, 
as some historical revisionists would have us believe, just a kind of 
tug of war between two great powers--the United States and Russia--but 
a conflict of ideas, a continuation of the struggle between good and 
evil, between freedom and tyranny. That is, in its way, the history of 
our species on this Earth.
  Senator Tom Dodd understood that the battle against communism, the 
cold war, was part of that struggle of good against evil.
  His passion for justice, his hatred of oppression, his understanding 
that human rights began with the vision that every individual is sacred 
because God created that individual, his understanding that we had to 
strive to establish the rule of law to protect human rights and to 
promote justice was expressed magnificently, brilliantly in his work as 
an executive trial counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after 
the war.
  A film was shown of some of Tom Dodd's appearances at the Nuremberg 
trial. It was riveting. He was brilliant and compelling, and in that 
extraordinary human historic experience, coming out of the devastation 
and lawlessness of the Holocaust, established the principle of justice 
through law.
  Senator Chris Dodd, who spoke that day, reminded us that one of the 
remarkable achievements of the Nuremberg trial was not just those who 
were guilty, who were convicted and severely punished, but that three 
people were actually acquitted at Nuremberg and that, in its way, is a 
testament to the rule of law and justice as well.
  A beautiful building, 50,000 square feet, a repository of historic 
papers, Senator Dodd's and others--a living legacy that will go on from 
generation to generation bringing scholars there to study, to write and 
to be reminded of the centerpiece of the career of Senator Tom Dodd, 
which was the struggle for human rights and justice through law and the 
need to continue to fight that battle.
  Mr. President, the day on Sunday was a day in which we dedicated a 
building, but it was also a day in which I think Connecticut was struck 
and riveted by what was happening to bring the building about. It was 
truly an expression of devotion of a son to his father, an expression 
of the love of Chris Dodd and his brothers and sisters for their father 
and their commitment to honor his memory. As I had the opportunity to 
say on Sunday in Connecticut, as beautiful a fulfillment as I have ever 
seen of the Biblical commandment, honor one's father and mother, and 
the Dodd family did it with dignity and with purpose befitting their 
father, Tom Dodd, on Sunday in Connecticut.
  But, of course, the truly significant way and the ongoing way in 
which my colleague from Connecticut and dear friend, Chris Dodd, honors 
the memory of his father is by the extraordinary quality of his service 
in this body by his personal fight for human rights throughout the 
world and at home, and particularly at home for the rights of children, 
understanding and reminding each of us, as Senator Chris Dodd has so 
often on this floor, that a child who is without adequate food, without 
adequate shelter, without adequate parentage, without decent health 
care, without safety and protection from crime and abuse, suffers in 
that child's way, as much as people who are forced to live under 
tyranny, and in that sense, is deprived of human rights as well.
  It struck me, and I know my colleagues on the floor, knowing and 
loving Senator Chris Dodd as I do, will share the thought that I had on 
Sunday, which was, as we thought about Nuremberg and we thought about 
the Second World War and the films were there of the Holocaust and the 
genocide, that our colleague and friend, Senator Chris Dodd, in his 
service, in his life, is the diametric opposite of the evils that were 
portrayed and lived and suffered through in the Second World War; 
really a person without bias, a person of great warmth and compassion, 
a person of openness to all and a person who really in his life carries 
on the legacy that his father left.
  It was a spectacular day which had great meaning for the Dodd family, 
which truly honored the memory of Senator Thomas Dodd, which the 
President graced with a magnificent speech, talking as the President 
did about the record of Senator Tom Dodd, but also bringing it to bear 
on the acts of genocide that have occurred in the former Yugoslavia, on 
the importance of the war crimes tribunal that is now going on in The 
Hague directed to the war crimes that have been committed in the former 
Yugoslavia. And, finally, the President expressed support for the idea 
of a permanent court of international justice, a permanent court 
operating perhaps through the United Nations, emanating out of the 
United Nations, which could stand as witness and deterrent, as Senator 
Dodd did at Nuremberg, to prosecute those who violate accepted rules of 
international justice and fairness.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the text of President Clinton's remarks at the University of 
Connecticut dedication of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on Sunday, 
as well as several articles from the Connecticut press, the Hartford 
Courant in particular, about the life and service of Senator Tom Dodd 
and what it means to each of us today.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 Transcript of President Clinton's Remarks at Dedication of Thomas J. 
                 Dodd Research Center, October 15, 1995

       Thank you very much, President Hartley. Governor Rowland, 
     Senator Lieberman, members of Congress, and distinguished 
     United States senators and former senators who have come 
     today; Chairman Rome, members of the Diplomatic Corps; to all 
     of you who have done anything to make this great day come to 
     pass; to my friend and former colleague, Governor O'Neill, 
     and most of all, to Senator Dodd. Ambassador Dodd, and the 
     Dodd family: I am delighted to be here.
       I have so many thoughts now. I can't mentioning one--since 
     President Hartley mentioned the day we had your magnificent 
     women's basketball team there, we also had the UCLA men's 
     team there. You may not remember who UCLA defeated for the 
     national championship--(laughter)--but I do remember that 
     UCONN defeated the University of Tennessee. And that made my 
     life with Al Gore much more bearable. (Laughter.) So I was 
     doubly pleased when UCONN won the national championship. 
     (Applause.)
       I also did not know until it was stated here at the outset 
     of this ceremony that no sitting President had the privilege 
     of coming to the University of Connecticut before, but they 
     don't know what they missed. I'm glad to be the first, and I 
     know I won't be the last. (Applause.)
       I also want to pay a special public tribute to the Dodd 
     family for their work on this enterprise, and for their 
     devotion to each other and the memory of Senator Thomas Dodd. 
     If, as so many of us believe, this country rests in the end 
     upon its devotion to freedom and liberty and democracy, and 
     upon the strength of its families, you could hardly find a 
     better example than the Dodd family, not only for their 
     devotion to liberty and democracy, but also for their 
     devotion to family and to the memory of Senator Tom Dodd. It 
     has deeply moved all of us, and we thank you for your 
     example. (Applause.)

                           *   *   *   *   *

                                                                    ____


            [From the Hartford (CT) Courant, Oct. 12, 1995]

          From Father to Son, Dodd Name Passed Along in Senate

                          (By David Lightman)

       Washington.--It was not that Chris Dodd didn't love running 
     the Stamford campaign for his father's 1970 U.S. Senate bid.
       In fact, the task fit him. He was 26 and full of energy and 
     ideas for his first formal brush 

[[Page S 15280]]
     with elective politics. He loved people, loved the political arena, 
     loved everything about it.
       But the campaign was sputtering, and even a rookie could 
     understand why. Three years earlier, Sen. Thomas Dodd, D-
     Conn., had become only the seventh person in history to be 
     censured by the U.S. Senate. And now the censure--for 
     improper use of campaign funds--hung like an anvil around the 
     neck of the candidate.
       Of course, what everyone, including young Dodd, could see 
     coming, happened. And when the Election Day mauling was over, 
     he drove back to the family's Old Lyme home, crushed. He 
     thought he had let down the father he respected and loved so 
     much.
       But Daddy, as Chris Dodd called his father, was not 
     scowling. ``He poured a glass of Dewar's scotch,'' recalled 
     Chris Dodd, ``and thanked me for putting in the time.''
       His father's grace in defeat--rather than his triumphs at 
     the top--helped convince Chris Dodd that politics was an 
     honorable profession. And the son, now Sen. Christopher J. 
     Dodd, D-Conn., has dedicated at least part of his own career 
     to ensuring that his father is remembered as an honorable 
     politician.
       ``Sometimes, I think almost everything Chris Dodd does down 
     here is meant to vindicate his father,'' said Sen. Daniel K. 
     Inouye, D-Hawaii, who served in the Senate with both Dodds.
       He has taken up some of the issues his father held dear, 
     such as foreign policy and children's welfare.
       He has kept his father's memory alive in the Senate 
     chambers. Chris Dodd sits behind his father's desk and keeps 
     his father's barrel-back, wood-and-leather chair in his 
     office. A huge illuminated portrait of Thomas Dodd looks down 
     on visitors to the office's conference room.
       And he has worked quietly to rehabilitate the Dodd name. 
     The very presence of Chris Dodd in the U.S. Senate is daily 
     testimony to the success of that effort. And Sunday's 
     dedication of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the 
     University of Connecticut is his monument.
       The Dodd family helped raise over $1 million for programs 
     at the center, which will house the senior Dodd's political 
     papers, along with other archival material.
       The four-day conference that coincides with the center's 
     dedication will focus on the legacy of the Nuremberg trials. 
     Thomas Dodd's year as a Nuremberg prosecutor was ``the 
     seminal event in my father's professional life,'' Chris Dodd 
     said.
       ``I had given thought over the years to what would be a 
     fitting memorial,'' the younger Dodd said. ``We'd thought of 
     a road or a bridge or a park, but I didn't like the idea of 
     people driving over his name.
       ``This is a research center at the flagship university in 
     our state, just a few short miles from where he was raised. 
     There's a lot of symbolism to it. My father would have loved 
     this,'' he said.


                         shielded from censure

       Chris Dodd said he has been able to maintain his love of 
     politics, while many in his family have not, because he was 
     not a witness to his father's humiliation. After graduating 
     from Providence College in 1966, the younger Dodd joined the 
     Peace Corps and went to the Dominican Republic.
       He was there when his father became the first caught by an 
     ethical system that was undergoing profound changes in the 
     1960s. Stung by charges that Secretary of the Senate Bobby 
     Baker used his office to help his business, the Senate set up 
     an Ethics Committee in 1964.
       The Dodd case would be its first mission. In February 1966, 
     a month after columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson began 
     writing articles accusing Dodd of using campaign money for 
     personal expenses, Dodd asked the new committee to look into 
     the complaints.
       The committee held hearings in the summer of 1966 and 
     continued them the next year. Dodd testified that money 
     raised at testimonial dinners were ``to be spent at the 
     discretion of the recipient.'' In response to a complaint 
     that he helped a Chicago public relations representative gain 
     favor with the West German government, Dodd said he was 
     simply an errand boy for the executive.
       The committee recommended he be censured on two counts--
     using campaign money for personal expenses and billing trips 
     to both the Senate and to private organizations.
       The Senate would not censure him on the second charge; it 
     agreed to strike it, 51-45. But it did vote 92-5 to censure 
     him on the first charge, with only Sens. Abraham A. Ribicoff, 
     D-Conn.; John Tower, R-Texas; Russell Long, D-La; Strom 
     Thurmond, R-S.C.; and Dodd himself opposing the resolution.
       It was a stunning setback for a politician who just three 
     years earlier was being seriously considered by President 
     Johnson for the vice presidency.
       Chris Dodd received newspaper clippings, sent by family and 
     friends, about his father's ordeal, but he did not live 
     through it directly. He did not have to endure the daily 
     batterings from Pearson and Anderson, or read about the march 
     of Connecticut figures to the Ethics Committee in 1967 to 
     testify about his father, or hear his father's May 15, 1967, 
     radio speech to the people of Connecticut in which he called 
     his pending censure ``a strange coming together of hateful 
     and vengeful interests.''
       ``They may have been trying to shield me,'' Chris Dodd said 
     of his family. ``I was living in a vacuum.''
       By the time he returned to the United States on Christmas 
     Eve 1968, U.S. politics involved other topics.
       Despite the Senate's resounding verdict, Thomas Dodd 
     continued to serve, maintaining his seniority and 
     chairmanship of the juvenvile delinquency subcommittee and 
     vice chairmanship of the internal security subcommittee. In 
     1968, he saw Congress pass the gun control legislation he had 
     championed for years, albelt a watered-down version of what 
     he had sought.
       He lost his seat in 1970, largely because of the censure. 
     Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., then a U.S. representative from 
     southwestern Connecticut, won with 41 percent of the vote. 
     Democrat Joseph Duffey got 34 percent, and Dodd was third 
     with 24.5 percent.
       When Thomas Dodd died in May 1971, four months after 
     leaving the Senate, the rehabilitation of the Dodd name began 
     in earnest.
       Senators offered tributes on the floor. Sen. James Allen, 
     D-Ala., recalled how, ``He fought unceasingly against crime, 
     juvenile delinquency and drug addiction.'' Sen. James 
     Buckley, Conservative-N.Y., called him ``an eminent analyst 
     of Cold War strategy.''
       In February 1972, Ribicoff asked the Senate to give its 
     unanimous consent to printing colleagues' eulogies in a 
     special book, a memorial to Thomas Dodd. That book is 
     available today in the U.S. Senate library.


                           Winning as a Dodd

       But restoration of the Dodd name has come more from his 
     son's political success than his colleagues' flowery words.
       Thomas Dodd did not urge his children to become involved in 
     politics--``We were never asked to pose for pictures,'' 
     recalled Chris Dodd--but the son could not help notice all 
     the excitement his father's work was generating.
       Chris Dodd was a teenager when his father was elected to 
     the Senate in 1958. ``He was working all the time, and at 
     night he'd most likely be at some function or another.'' 
     Chris Dodd said, ``But when he'd come to the house, you'd be 
     aware of his arrival. Dogs would bark, people would get 
     excited. He may not have been home for dinner at 5:30, but 
     bonds were forged in different ways.''
       The younger Dodd liked the idea of going into politics, but 
     it was not a burning ambition. ``I knew enough to know that 
     was not the kind of ambition you should have, that becoming a 
     member of Congress is something you don't always control,'' 
     he said.
       Chris Dodd did not make the classic young man's political 
     moves. He moved to North Stonington, hardly a hotbed of 
     Democratic activity. He joined a law firm that did not 
     encourage people to run for office. And he lived in a 
     congressional district represented by Robert H. Steele Jr., a 
     Republican who at the time looked like he could hold the seat 
     until the 21st century.
       Still, Chris Dodd ran for the House of Representatives in 
     1974, an election held three months after President Nixon 
     resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Even though it 
     was a good time for Democrats, ``A lot of people told me I 
     could never get elected with the Dodd name,'' Chris Dodd 
     recalled. He did, of course, ``and then people told me it was 
     because of the Dodd name,'' he said.
       Inouye viewed the son as a man on a mission.
       Chris Dodd's style, his choice of issues, his way of 
     dealing with people is all meant to convey the idea that his 
     father was a person of honor and Chris is here to remind you 
     of that, said Inouye and others.
       Though he was only 36 when he joined the Senate in 1981, he 
     quickly befrinded some of his father's colleagues, including 
     Inouye and Sens. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C.; Robert C. Byrd, 
     D-W.Va; and Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.
       And he didn't forget one of his father's few supporters 
     during the censure vote. Chris Dodd was one of only three 
     Democratic senators to back John Tower's controversial and 
     unsuccessful nomination as secretary of defense in 1989.
       ``Their presence on the Senate floor is very similar,'' 
     said Inouye. ``When I look at Chris Dodd and close my eyes, I 
     can imagine Tom Dodd speaking.''
       Kennedy also notices a similarity in how the two men put 
     together legislation. Chris Dodd makes a habit of visiting 
     Connecticut high schools to talk to youngsters, particularly 
     about the problems of weapons in schools. Then he returns to 
     Washington and uses anecdotes to help him push for a bill.
       Thomas Dodd would do the same kind of thing. ``He'd get in 
     his car and, go around Maryland and Virginia and go to gun 
     shops,'' Kennedy recalled. ``He would find out what was 
     happening and then translate that into legislation.
       ``When Tom Dodd or Chris Dodd wanted something, they were 
     bulldogs,'' Kennedy said.
       There are, however, important differences between the two. 
     One of them is their relationship with the Kennedys.
       Chris Dodd is viewed as Kennedy's best friend in the 
     Senate. Thomas Dodd, on the other hand, was one of the few 
     prominent New England officeholders to endorse then-Senate 
     Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson over then-Sen. John F. 
     Kennedy in the 1960 battle for the Democratic presidential 
     nomination.
       There are personality differences as well. ``Tom Dodd was 
     more reserved; Chris is more of a glad-hander,'' said 
     Thurmond, who was a 

[[Page S 15281]]
     Democrat when Tom Dodd arrived in the Senate.
       Hollings put it more bluntly. ``Christopher has a much more 
     engaging personality,'' he said.
       And Chris Dodd is much more of an insider than Thomas Dodd 
     ever was. In 1963, the elder Dodd blasted Senate Majority 
     Leader Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., on the Senate floor.
       Chris Dodd, on the other hand, competed for the job of 
     Senate Democratic leader last year and lost, even after a 
     late start, by only one vote. A month later, he became 
     President Clinton's hand-picked choice as Democratic National 
     Committee general chairman.


                           liking the linkage

       The father and son have taken up some of the same issues. 
     Chris Dodd likes to draw a line between his father's work in 
     the 1930s with the National Youth Administration, a 
     Depression-era agency that helped children from poor families 
     get education and employment training, and his own work 
     today.
       Chris Dodd chaired the Senate's subcommittee on children, 
     families, drugs and alcoholism until Republicans won the 
     Senate in 1994. He remains the Senate's leading voice on 
     children's issues, most recently brokering a compromise to 
     the welfare reform bill that will mean $8 billion in extra 
     money for child-care programs during the next five years.
       ``I can see him moving bills like that,'' said Chris Dodd. 
     ``I'd like to think he'd be more supportive than not of what 
     I do, very proud.''
       In foreign policy, Chris Dodd was able to see finished 
     something his father had helped start.
       In 1950, Thomas Dodd, then a member of a special American 
     Bar Association committee, had urged members of the Senate 
     Foreign Relations Committee to approve a treaty establishing 
     penalties for genocide.
       Yet the Senate for years refused to ratify the treaty, some 
     senators fearing the U.S. sovereignty would be compromised.
       The son battled hard for his father's cause. In 1984, Chris 
     Dodd, who like his father served on the Senate Foreign 
     Relations Committee, quoted on the Senate floor his father's 
     words from two decades earlier: ``For me, the genocide 
     convention has a special personal meaning because as 
     executive trial counsel at Nuremberg I had spread before me, 
     in nightmarish detail, the whole incredible story of Nazi 
     barbarism.''
       Two years later, as the Senate debated the treaty again, 
     Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., recalled the senior Dodd's 
     commitment. ``Tom Dodd, the father of Sen. Chris Dodd, 
     contributed a special zeal to this effort,'' he said. ``It 
     was his opinion that had it [the treaty] been in existence 
     when Hitler first came to power the tragic events of his 
     regime might have been prevented.''
       Finally, in 1986, as the Cold War wound down, the Senate 
     approved the treaty.
       Father and son, however, were not always in sync, 
     particularly on foreign policy.
       Thomas Dodd was a relentless anti-Communist from his 
     Nuremberg days. Though representatives from the Soviet Union 
     were part of the tribunal, his dealings with them made him 
     think they were capable of the same kinds of horrors as the 
     Nazis.
       They are ``probably doing this same sort of thing behind 
     the Iron Curtain now,'' he said in his 1950 testimony, 
     ``Russia in its plan, as I see it, wishes to influence people 
     all over the world.''
       While many Democrats were urging the United States to pull 
     troops out of Vietnam in the late 1960s, Thomas Dodd remained 
     staunchly behind the war effort.
       By contrast, his son, though no rabid anti-war activist, 
     came to oppose the Vietnam War in 1968, and served in the 
     U.S. Army Reserve to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
       In the Senate, Chris Dodd opposed the Reagan 
     administration's efforts to provide military aid to ``freedom 
     fighters'' trying to unseat the democratically elected and 
     socialist government of Nicaragua. He pushed hard for 
     economic aid to address fundamental economic problems in the 
     Caribbean and Central America.
       But the son warned that the differences between father and 
     son should not be overstated. They are of two different eras, 
     but share the same values and thoughts, he said.
       ``I have a lot of affection and admiration for my father,'' 
     said Chris Dodd. ``I like the tradition. I like the 
     linkage.''
                                                                    ____


               [From the Hartford Courant, Oct. 8, 1995]

            Tom Dodd's Letters Open New Window Into History

                          (By Mark Pazniokas)

       A half-century ago, amid the rubble of a vanquished 
     Germany, the victorious Allies put Nazi leaders on trial for 
     crimes against peace and humanity.
       The Reich's unspeakable atrocities were laid bare in a 
     dozen trials and hundreds of convictions. But the Nuremberg 
     trials had an even more noble aspiration: to make 
     international law a force for peace.
       Beginning today, The Courant will explore the meaning of 
     the trials and their ambiguous legacy in a four-part series. 
     Next week, the University of Connecticut will commemorate the 
     50th anniversary by dedicating the Thomas J. Dodd Research 
     Center and holding a conference on human rights and the rule 
     of law.
       Horror fills the yellowed letter, written long ago in a 
     bombed out hotel. It is dated Aug. 14, 1945, the day after a 
     wide-eyed Thomas J. Dodd arrived in Nuremberg, Germany, to 
     prosecute the Nazis.
       Three months after V-E Day, the stench of death still hung 
     heavy in the summer air. An estimated 20,000 dead lay 
     entombed in the rubble of the old city, where legions had 
     rallied for Hitler before the war.
       Half the population of 400,000 fled before the Americans 
     took the city in April. Many of those who stayed now slept in 
     cellars, emerging each morning like mice to forage in the 
     dusty ruins.
       ``Grace, my dearest one,'' Dodd wrote to his wife, safe at 
     home in Connecticut with their five children, the youngest 
     being the 14-month-old Christopher. ``Here I am in the dead 
     city of Nuremberg.''
       So began an unbroken stream of letters that Tom Dodd, then 
     a 38-year-old government lawyer abroad for the first time, 
     would write daily from Nuremberg until sailing home in 
     October 1946.
       The collection remained unseen outside the Dodd family 
     until last month, when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd granted The 
     Courant access for stories marking the 50th anniversary of 
     the first Nuremberg war-crimes trial.
       Nuremberg was the real ``trial of the century,'' a yearlong 
     dissection of how the Nazis murdered millions and pillaged a 
     continent.
       Twenty-one men stood trial before an unprecedented 
     International Military Tribunal, which the four Allied powers 
     created to mete out justice and compile an incontrovertible 
     record of Nazi outrages. Architects of the tribunal also had 
     a higher hope: to set an international standard for judging 
     war crimes.
       Tom Dodd returned home a hero from Nuremberg, poised for a 
     political career that would make him a congressman, a senator 
     and a national figure opposed to communism, which he viewed 
     as the moral equivalent of Nazism.
       But the letters to his wife show a man who was at a 
     crossroads at Nuremberg, bedeviled by doubts about his career 
     and even his continued participation in what he knew was a 
     historic trial.
       Hopes of entering politics seemed to be slipping away. He 
     told his wife in one pessimistic letter that the future 
     belonged to the men who spent the war in uniform. Dodd had 
     been a federal prosecutor during the war.
       Dodd's children long had viewed the letters as his private 
     notes to their mother. She supported their father through his 
     many triumphs and, in 1967, his censure by the Senate for 
     misusing campaign funds. The Dodds died within 20 months of 
     each other: Tom in May 1971, months after losing his Senate 
     seat; Grace in January 1973.
       ``Many of them,'' Chris Dodd said recently of his father's 
     Nuremberg letters, ``are what I would consider to be love 
     letters.''
       They are full of tender references to ``that day in St. 
     Paul.'' Tom Dodd and Grace Murphy married May 19, 1934, in 
     St. Paul, Minn., where he was assigned as an FBI agent.
       Most are written by hand in a flowing script, in ink when 
     available, in pencil when necessary. They are conversations 
     between the sometimes-crusty prosecutor and his ``dearest 
     Grace.''
       ``I am not conscious of proper grammatical construction or 
     of word choice or any formality,'' he told Grace. ``I am on 
     the sofa and I am talking to you and I'll be darned if I will 
     pick my words like a parson preparing a sermon.''


                         from norwich to london

       Tom and Grace Dodd made their goodbyes before dawn at Union 
     Station in Washington, D.C., on July 27, 1946. Dodd had been 
     recruited from the U.S. attorney general's staff for the 
     United Nations War Crimes Commission.
       ``You made a memorable picture for me as I gazed out the 
     taxicab window until the dimness of the dawn light blotted 
     your loveliness out,'' Dodd wrote her from London, his first 
     stop in Europe.
       He one day would become a foreign policy expert, relied 
     upon by Lyndon B. Johnson, but in 1945 he was small-town 
     Connecticut. He was born in Norwich and lived in Lebanon, a 
     part of the state that had more cows than people.
       His letter from London is enthusiastic travelogue, full of 
     details about his flight aboard a military transport that 
     hopscotched from Washington to Newfoundland to Prestwick, 
     Scotland, where he caught another flight to London.
       Trans-Atlantic air travel was still a novelty, and Dodd 
     stayed up most of the night chatting with a crewman, who 
     regaled him with tales of planes lost without a trace in the 
     North Atlantic.
       At first light, Dodd wrote gratefully, ``The sun came up 
     beautifully about 4:30 a.m. London time.''
       Dodd had graduated from Yale Law School in 1933, an Irish-
     Catholic at a blue-blooded institution. He was president of 
     the Yale Democratic Club and organizer of ``the Flying 
     Wedge,'' a cadre that passionately defended Franklin D. 
     Roosevelt's New Deal.
       He spent a year as an FBI agent, chasing John Dillinger 
     through the Midwest; served for a time as director of the 
     National Youth Administration in Connecticut; then tried 
     civil rights cases for the Justice Department. During the 
     war, he prosecuted spies and profiteers.
       He cut an impressive figure. His hair, prematurely going 
     gray, was brushed straight back. He had piercing eyes and 
     thick, dark eyebrows, a ringing speaking voice and the same 
     sarcastic wit later shown by Christopher, the son who would 
     follow him onto the national political stage.

[[Page S 15282]]

       In London, Dodd felt humbled by the war-weary populace.
       ``They stared at the cab from eyes that I could not meet, 
     attired in clothing that made me wince,'' Dodd wrote. ``I 
     really feel ashamed when these people stare--for they 
     recognize an American by the quality of his clothing.''
       Of course, he had seen nothing yet. In a few months, Dodd 
     would be numb to the horror of war and complain about being 
     bored by the confession of a man who murdered 1\1/2\ million 
     people at Auschwitz.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.

                          ____________________